Slow Horses

Slow Horses Apple TV+

Most spy stories are built on competence.
Precision. Control. People who are always one step ahead.

Slow Horses chooses the opposite.

This is where failure is parked. Not dramatic failure — but the quiet kind. Careers that stalled. Mistakes that couldn’t be erased, only reassigned. These people are not exiled heroes; they are kept around because the system finds it easier not to deal with them.

And that is where the honesty begins.

Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, is deliberately unpleasant. Not charming, not redeemable in the usual sense. But he sees clearly. And the series does too. It never pretends intelligence work is elegant. It shows power as it usually operates: through fatigue, ego, paperwork, and decisions no one wants to own afterward.

The pacing matters. Things unfold slowly, sometimes uncomfortably so. There are moments where nothing happens — because in reality, nothing often does. Until it suddenly does, and the consequences land somewhere else entirely.

Slow Horses isn’t really about espionage.
It’s about systems.
And the people who slip through them rather than rise within them.

You don’t watch it for excitement.
You watch it to recognize how things actually function.

And perhaps to notice how close that feels.